Your smaller city can provide responsive citizen services with the cloud
As a city leader in a smaller city, you may wonder what smart city solutions and technology like the cloud mean for you? Are they just meant for bigger cities or can they help your smaller city too?
Every city has its own unique challenges, but all cities—big or small—are trying to keep up with emerging demands and increasing citizen expectations. And your smaller city is tasked with doing so within constrained budgets.
The great news is that today’s technologies such as the cloud make it more economically viable—and efficient—for cities of any size to provide responsive services to citizens.
In many ways, the cloud has leveled the playing field between smaller and bigger cities. Your small city can subscribe to the same type of state-of-the art, intelligent and powerful technology—with the latest security capabilities—that big cities can. You don’t have to make a huge capital expenditure to install hardware and software in your own datacenter, you just pay for the cloud services you need—scaling up or down as needed.
And by being freed up from worrying about datacenter infrastructure, you can focus more on creating better experiences for your constituents, as Chief Innovation Officer of e.Republic Dustin Haisler is quoted as saying in this blog.
That’s what the city of Doral in Florida is doing by providing citizens with access to everything from one place—whether they’re reporting a pothole, tracking an existing service request, checking the youth soccer schedule, or seeing their tennis league ranking. Its website “manages the entire citizen relationship from one portal” says Brett Cocking, managing director of Sales at Aeon Nexus Corporation.
An integrated web environment is what makes Doral’s site unique, with Adxstudio Portals and Dynamics CRM Online for Government automatically managing content and tracking 311 service requests or problem reporting. Learn how the Microsoft cloud platform, including the trusted Azure Government cloud made it possible for the city of Doral to do more with less: Read the blog.
Perhaps your city is small in terms of population and staff, but the citizens you serve span a large geographical area. You can make it easier for them to interact with your city government using online tools like the City of Doral has. And you can also empower your employees out in the field to access and capture the latest information using cloud-based tools on mobile devices to improve service delivery, which is what Mitchell Shire Council in Australia is doing. Find out how Mitchell Shire is using Office 365 and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security to enable employees out on the road to stay productive and secure on their favorite apps and devices: Read the customer story.
To learn more about how your smaller city can take advantage of the cloud to engage your citizens, empower your employees, optimize your operations and infrastructure, and accelerate innovation and opportunity, visit our CityNext webpage.
You can also watch the Local Gov Tech Summit on demand, where you can see Dustin Haisler’s keynote, in which he shares examples of how smaller cities like yours are taking advantage of the cost-effectiveness and agility of the cloud to address their challenges and innovate. And you can check out nine other immersive sessions on topics specifically for local government decision makers—just go to the registration page for the Local Gov Tech Summit.
